What is site quality in a car wash acquisition?

What gets scored

• Traffic count (AADT) at the parcel — most top-performing express sites sit above 40,000 vehicles/day; below ~20,000 is generally too thin. See what counts as a good AADT.
• Posted speed — roughly 25–45 mph is ideal; above ~50 mph drivers won't comfortably turn in.
• Side of street — the going-home side of the evening commute meaningfully outperforms the same count on the other side.
• Visibility — sites visible from a half-mile out beat tucked-away parcels by a real margin.
• Ingress/egress — easy right-in/right-out; left turns across traffic shed demand.
• Stacking capacity — queue depth that survives Saturday peak without spilling into the road.
• Adjacent uses and expansion room — daily-needs retail feeding trips past the site, and space to add stacking, vacuums, or a tunnel later.

The asymmetry that makes it matter

A mediocre operator on a great site is often the best kind of target — operations are fixable. A great operator on a bad site is structurally capped, and buyers who pay for the operator's excellence are paying for work that can't compound. That asymmetry is why site quality carries the same 20-point weight as market quality in the acquisition scorecard.

How WashIndex assesses it

The platform carries traffic counts at the parcel level, real 5-, 10-, and 15-minute drive-time trade areas instead of radius rings, and satellite imagery with points-of-interest context so visibility, access, stacking room, and adjacent draws can be screened without visiting every candidate. Thresholds live on the site selection benchmarks reference.